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Written by Carlo Zancanaro on 2024-11-19 at 06:42

I've written a #ruby library for database-backed production rules: https://sr.ht/~czan/active_record_rules

At $dayjob our main project is a #ruby on #rails project. We have a lot of callbacks on our ActiveRecord models with some complex logic behind them, which has generally been pretty painful. We tend to have three problems:

1. we trigger expensive recalculations too often, because our callbacks are too broad;

2. we don't trigger recalculations when we should, leaving things in an inconsistent state; and

3. we trigger recalculations synchronously and delay our response to the user.

I've always been interested in using production rules as a tool for programmers to express business logic, in the vein of Clara Rules (https://www.clara-rules.org/). I've never been able to find one that works on top of a relational database, though, despite finding literature on the concept from the early 1990s.

ActiveRecordRules is my attempt to write a system to do this. I read about RETE/TREAT, and other algorithms for production systems, but in the end I just rely on Postgres to be smart. 🙂

My question is: does anyone know of other libraries that solve a similar problem? I'm interested in anything resembling a production rules system, no matter what language it's written in.

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